“It may matter,” she whispered, and then withdrew her arm, and hastily quitted the bridge, after one anxious look at the sloop, and a murmured prayer that it would safely reach port.
Chapter Twelve.
A Strange Vessel.
Five days after the stormy scene on the bridge, Frank Hume and Webster were lying forward, upon rugs, on the turtle-shell deck, in the full blaze of a hot sun. The sea was calm, even beyond the power of the Swift to toss up spray, and stretched away, unbroken by so much as a single gleam of white, to the horizon, though astern there lay a long trail, slightly sinuous, over which, with many a sweep and soar, there hawked a pair of gulls. Now and again, from the heave of the water before the fast slipping foot of the Swift, there ripped out a flight of flying fish, who, after an unmistakable beat of their glittering wings, shot away to the right and left, to fall with an awkward splash into the sea.
Here and there, propped up against some wide-mouthed ventilator, or stretched in the grateful shadows of the boats, were a few barefooted sailors engaged with needle and thread, while under an awning aft Mr Commins and Miss Anstrade reclined in deck-chairs. The harsh grating noise of the steering gear, and the ceaseless thud of the propellers, alone broke the silence, which, like the silence of vast stretches ashore, or of deep-wooded solitudes, hushes the voice of animals and kills speech in men. Out on the bosom of the sea, or on the summit of a mountain, the trifles which interest us among our fellows have little power against the subduing influence of vast unpeopled spaces.
All the morning the steamer reached on, always remaining in the centre of the same wide circle, and it was only when the Quartermaster struck eight bells that there was any movement among the brooding men. Webster sat up, and with his hands on his knees, and his cap at the back of his head, looked over the shining waste, then yawned.
“What an eloquent fellow you are, Hume!” he said; “you’ve got no more conversation and greater powers of observation than a bale of wool. There’s that fellow Commins still talking to the Commodore and oiling his jaw-tackle with iced champagne, the lubber; and to think you might be enjoying the same privileges if you only had the wit to make yourself agreeable.”
“I don’t care for champagne iced.”